Greetings GHC and Haskell folk, please excuse the cross-post.
This is a coordinational message. :)
I've been longing for Unicode (UTF-8) input support in GHC for a long
time. I am currently customizing a keyboard layout to include many
mathematical operators and special characters which would be very
useful in writing even prettier (!) Haskell code. I'd be interested to
complete the keyboard layout and make it public, to raise the value of
Unicode input support. When will it happen?
To make the fun complete, I think a few adjustments to the Haskell
grammar would be in order, so, guessing the relevant people read these
lists, may I suggest the following?
1. In addition to the backslash, accept "mathematical * small lamda"
(U+1D6CC, U+1D706, U+1D740, U+1D77A, and U+1D7B4) for lambda
abstractions. Leave "greek small letter lamda" as a regular letter, so
the Greeks can write their native language.
2. In addition to "->", accept "rightwards arrow" U+2192 as the
function arrow.
3. Accept "leftwards arrow" U+2190 in do and notation.
4. Accept "leftwards arrow-tail" U+2919 in arrow notation.
5. Accept "rightwards double arrow" U+21D2 in addition to "=>" for
type contexts.
6. Accept "for all" U+2200 in addition to the forall keyword.
7. Remove the symbols for clearly prefix operators (n-ary summation
and product, logical not, etc.) from the set of characters used to
build binary operators. Leave them as identifier letters, so they can
be bound to regular functions.
Did I forget anything?
Being a Macintosh user, I've assembled a Mac OS keylayout file. For
anyone interested, the current version can be downloaded:
http://www.scannedinavian.org/~pesco/distfiles/hallberg-dvorak.zip
The base layout is Dvorak. Caps Lock switches to Greek mode, where 'a'
changes to alpha, 'b' to beta, etc. Alt (Option) accesses the symbol
map. Shift-Alt gives a second level of symbols.
Currently, the symbol map contains german Umlaute for me. I'll most
probably move them behind dead-keys soon, though. (A-e giving Ä etc.)
I can produce an XKB map for X11 once I'm happy with the layout. It
would be cool if someone could also port the thing to Windows around
that time. Please get in touch if you're interested.
Let me know what you think,
Sven Moritz Hallberg
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